April 7, 2008

Following up: Order Drafts

By now, all teams should have received feedback on their Orders. We provided major feedback via email, and the picky stuff will show up on your print copy on Saturday. If you personally haven’t seen electronic feedback, check with your team – one person in the team (at least) will have received it.

One more caution about multiple targets or multi-faceted targets: tight focus makes this assignment easier. Yes, you are allowed to have multiple foci. It will make your life more difficult if you have multiples, however. In real life you will have multiple targets, but give yourself a break while you’re learning! Another idea: focus on one area; if you can’t come up with enough “stuff” to buy, then add the next focus area.

Holly’s comment to the last post led me to clarify the assignment; I added publication date to the short list of consideration file fields. I can see where slight differences between the descriptive documents (the Final Project description, the Consideration file description, and the Order Draft description) could have been the basis of some confusion. Thanks to Holly for pointing this out.

Amount clarification: we found another old reference to $2000, but that didn’t seem to cause a problem in the draft. To be crystal clear: you must spend a minimum of $2500. If you use the padding method for avoiding the backorder problem, a 25% pad ($2000 + .25×2000) is recommended. However, $3000 is a nice round number to shoot for, if you are padding. Please note that it’s easier – and recommended – that you go over rather than under (unlike on The Price is Right). (That is, in real life, you will quickly accumulate a large consideration file; it will be tough gathering “enough” items to purchase the first time.) There’s no need to spend a lot of energy in whittling a large list down, as long as you include a Do Not Exceed $xxx statement.

Details that could be addressed here or on Saturday: methods for prioritizing; and the meaning of “classification” for the order list. I’ll do it here if it seems urgent, or on Saturday if not quite as urgent.

Don’t forget to look back one post to the suggested dates. There’s still time to provide input on those.

We are entering … correction, we are IN a very hectic phase of the semester – this last month as big assignments (and even dissertations) are due across the range of all my students. So we must all prioritize! Good luck with that, since I’m struggling with it too!